Stories From Under a Winter Sky promises to be a magical evening as winter approaches.
Shelley Thompson and the Blue Engine String quartet will be celebrating the coming season and her beautiful new short story collection, WINTER SKY, around the province in many different settings.
The book is described as -
"A blend of historical and contemporary, written in breathtaking prose, the stories in Winter Sky reflect the season’s contrasts: the light and the dark, the complexity and the comfort."
Thompson will be in a candlelit church (St. Stephen's Anglican) in Chester (Nov 29); In her own community at the beloved Al Whittle Theatre, Wolfville (Nov 20). In various bookstores and galleries, doing STORY TIME FOR GROWN UPS (with cookies and sometimes cookie decoration).
Thompson, best known to some Nova Scotians as Barb Lahey in Trailer Park Boys, but she directed the feature film DAWN HER DAD & THE TRACTOR and series TRANSLATIONS (CBC GEM and FibeTV!) before beginning her first, award-winning novel, ROAR. ROAR has just won the EVERGREEN PRIZE, a prize decided by readers and Librarians and presented by the Ontario Library Association. WINTER SKY is her second book.
In 2010, the CBC commissioned the first of several stories from Thompson. She says, “I've always had a love-hate relationship with winter and Christmas in particular. And it's always interesting or dramatic, never straightforward,” she says. “There's consistently something heightened about it — the sadness and the joy. Being solo at Christmas time can be isolating, and yet, for me, being part of a large blended family brought its own challenges”.
But Thompson loved performing the stories and commissioned Halifax Composer Chris Palmer to ‘score’ the stories as if they were films. She wanted to work with the Blue Engine String Quartet and this project has been a marriage made in heaven.
“We love getting together to work on these pieces," says Jennifer Jones, first violin in the quartet. “It’s the nicest part of our year. We laugh and we cry and make other people do the same. What more can you ask as a performer!”
Thompson credits the women in the Quartet for this publication. “They’d said to me a few times these stories should be part of a book. So finally, I listened and added to them!”
She's grateful for the support of her Nimbus editor, Whitney Moran, who embraced the collection, bringing on designer Bee Stanton to create simple, gorgeous frontispieces for each story.
Thompson and the Blue Engine String Quartet will be performing throughout the province this November and into January.
